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BILLY WATSON'S BEEF TRUST |
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Tearing off a strip The best-known peeler, as they were also known, was Gypsy Rose Lee, whose much-sanitised memoirs became the basis for the musical Gypsy. As the Stephen Sondheim/ Jule Styne song in that show so rightly put it, "You Got to Have a Gimmick." Lee's was gentility. She removed items of clothing with, as one critic put it, "the delicacy and insouciance of a debutante picking the leaves off an artichoke". Lee, who could not sing or dance, said she went into the business because "I could be a star without any talent at all". She did, however, have a genius for publicity. In her mid-Thirties heyday, she appeared in the newspapers more often than on stage, posing for photos under the bubbles of her gilded bathtub, next to the matching bath-mat and lavatory-seat cover she had made from one of her old mink coats. Realising that strippers were regarded as dummies, Gypsy brushed up her Shakespeare and quoted the classics to newspapermen, who were awed by her phenomenal intellect. In the musical Pal Joey (1940), Larry Hart ridiculed a stripper who sounded as if she had swallowed a quotations dictionary: "I have read the great Kabbalah/ And I simply worship Allah!... [zip!] I was reading Schopenhauer last night/ [zip!] And I think that Schopenhauer was right." Sally Rand's gimmick was the fan dance - her ostrich feathers fluttered in a way that, even when she was covered from neck to knee, was thrillingly suggestive. Rosita Royce, with her pigeons, and the more aristocratic Lili St Cyr, with her "educated" doves, took the feather business to its logical next step. And, unlike her rivals, who disrobed to languorous music at a stately pace, Georgia Sothern tore into a strip with limb-flailing abandon, flinging off her clothes to a wild chorus of "Hold That Tiger" and whipping her long red hair across her face. A sub-division of stripping was tassel-twirling, in which women with awesome control of the pectoral muscles could make these adornments revolve singly, together or in opposite directions. These top acts would play only the best burlesque houses, such as those owned in New York by the Minsky brothers. In the early Twenties, the Minskys introduced a feature that characterised burlesque as much as the later striptease - the runway. Extending the length of the stalls, bordered by lights, it brought the girls excitingly close to the audience, placing their ankles at eye level (for those few punters who were looking straight ahead). The quality theatres did four shows a day, but in the grind-houses at the bottom of the scale, performers might have to do as many as eight, and the facilities were not for the squeamish. Gypsy Rose Lee started her career in a Midwestern theatre with a common dressing room where gnats swarmed above a bucket of beer, its lip ringed by lipstick smears marked, in eyebrow pencil, with their owners' initials. Unlike more respectable entertainments, the performances of the great strippers are lost in history. Burlesque sometimes featured in movies, but the censorship that strangled any erotic expression at birth made striptease so anodyne as to be bewildering. In Lady of Burlesque (1943), Barbara Stanwyck and her supporting cast drive men wild in sturdily reinforced costumes twice as modest as those on any beach. Gypsy Rose Lee was signed for films, but the producers panicked, billed her under her real name (Louise Hovick) and covered her from neck to ankle. In 1929, a few years before the dead hand of censorship closed round the white throat of art, Rouben Mamoulian made the most authentic film of the milieu, Applause, which recreates the excitement of sex-starved men lining the runway and lapping round the ankles of the blowsy girls. In the Sixties, perhaps the best-known movie with a burlesque setting was made - The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) - but it lacked the genre's crude-but-homely spirit. Movies better served the galloping and mugging of the comics, including Fanny Brice, whose warm-hearted, rubber-faced antics are preserved in a few early talkies and in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), where she played herself. The early years of the Depression, a wretched time for legitimate theatre, were the most profitable for burlesque. Fewer people could afford $5 theatre tickets, but almost everyone who needed cheering up could find a quarter for burlesque. Unfortunately, that very popularity brought about its end. Burlesque houses were always being temporarily shut down after complaints to the police from local censorship or religious groups. (Nudity was forbidden, but its threat or semblance was enough to call out the cops. If a ticket-seller spotted a censor, he could flash a signal at the footlights to warn the artists to play "the Boston version".) But when Fiorello LaGuardia was elected New York's mayor in 1932, the puritanical Catholic had laws passed banning bad language and excessive exposure. In 1942, he outlawed burlesque altogether. The move was supported not only by moralists, but also by Broadway theatre-owners who wanted to remove the competition, and by property developers who bought up the redundant theatres and replaced them with office buildings. Other cities saw the writing on the wall, and soon even such famous theatres as the Old Howard in Boston or the Star and Garter in Chicago closed. But burlesque itself lingered, the racy acts incorporated into Broadway revues and nostalgia-fests. Ann Corio had a greater success than her stripping as the mistress of ceremonies of This Was Burlesque (1962), and in 1979, Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney had a huge hit in Sugar Babies. The middle class, by then wishing to separate itself from its fuddy-duddy forebears, were charmed by the earthy, teasing entertainment, and brought their children. Today's saucy burlesquers may wink and shimmy all they like, but, like the society in which sex was a secret, real burlesque is dead. 'Burlesque!', Arts Theatre, London WC1 (020-7836 3334), 20 April to 16 July 2005 http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=624815&host=5&dir=235 |
